If you have referred to any software as malware recently, please read this.

I am noticing (and the victim of) a disturbing new trend wherein any software that creates an inconvenience is immediately labeled malware by some members of the gaming community.

Malware already has a definition. It has been defined for decades. This is the definition everyone understands and the one that anyone casually reading your conversation is going to assume was intended.

Software is "malware" if and only if harm is purposely being done.

Accidental harm is not malware; we call this kind of software defective. DRM (i.e. Steamworks, uPlay, Origin) and related obstacles (i.e. Denuvo), though a major inconvenience, are not malware. Even though I could swear anti-virus software does nothing beneficial (it usually breaks stuff without telling you and then wastes your time), it also is not malware.

Circle back to the definition of malicious software and you will find that neither DRM nor Special K qualify. While DRM deliberately conceals its innerworkings, it is not there to harm you and we need not consult any source code to know this.

Special K is not designed to harm you, even if you are a swashbuckling pirate.

The next time you claim SK does one harmful thing or another, you know where to find the source code and you are obligated to point to the exact line of code that does what is being claimed. You won't find any because I have much more productive ways to spend my time.

Even my very thin layer of piracy detection has to do with YOU not wasting MY time troubleshooting an unstable version of the game I do not have. From this perspective, pirates are the malicious entites leeching resources I could have spent on something else.

On August 27, 2017, a major milestone reaffirmed my commitment to this community.

--standalone Special K turned one year old!

I had an opportunity to review Special K's progress over the year since it broke out as a standalone product to enhance / fix / have more fun with games.

After a bit of introspection, I realized I am every bit the full-stack game programmer now that I was in the late 90's and early 2000's when I was developing game engines at Lyra Studios.

I know low-level audio, graphics, input, network (somewhat dated) and even have machine learning (AI) under my belt thanks to post-grad education I did not have back then.

I realize I would be an asset to any game development company, but am more interested in writing tools I retain full ownership of. Helping our little piece of gaming on PC with technical issues is also important to me. I feel a stronger sense of purpose helping, rather than creating technology for a soulless publisher

With that, I would like to put to rest any ideas that I might start consulting for game port developers. I am open if ever presented an attractive offer, but let me make it clear, that stuff takes a backseat to my mod project and would likely only serve to finance this.

I have taken a step back and looked critically at the "design" of Special K -- hoping that if I squinted just right and believed hard enough I might find something -- but it simply does not exist.

The infamous captain Ad-Hoc design seeks to pilot our vessle aground!

I feel the only way to move this project forward for long-term continued development is to begin modularizing the project and actually spending quality design time on this thing, rather than writing throw-away debug code to reverse engineer individual games and then tacking useful features onto something with no maintainable or even discernible design.

I Will Be Isolating Various Functions

My Custom ImGui Implementation and Input Management System

Offers a more intuitive input experience using gamepad, keyboard, mouse than seen in other projects using ImGui (i.e. ReShade)

Performance Data Collection and Profiling

For advanced modders or tweakers looking to improve performance, Special K has a few unique features not seen in other non-developer oriented tools

Shader, Texture and (in some mods) Mesh Modification Systems

Special K covers a larger range of APIs than any singular project I am aware of; these systems have not been unified and are in many cases sitting uniquely in specific game mods not being useful to the gaming community as a whole.

Installation, Auto-Update and Mod Content Add-on Infrastructure

Tales of Symphonia "Fix" has support for custom texture packs downloaded from GitHub, but the system is not extensible and only I am able to author such add-on content at the moment.

Debug Backend

I have built a sophisticated debug engine (in addition to D3D11 graphics debugger) into a piece of software whose primary application is not software development. I would like to capitalize on this and polish off the design of these systems to make writing mods easier for other small and large scale game mod projects.

Plug-Ins

The real powers of Special K are its plug-ins

They are non-standard at this point

I am continuing to learn good and bad design principles for a general purpose plug-in system and I really want developers to be able to write small plug-ins to Special K the same way I write my game mods. This is my biggest design goal and I expect will finally encourage open source collaboration once I fill-out and stabilize the design of the plug-in API.

I am eager to continue providing developer-grade tools in a relatively easy to digest form that give "normal" gamers the best possible gaming experience free from as many technical worries as I can help smooth out for you.

@charliewaffles: Unfortunately I don't have time for that right now :-\ I think the developers are going to have to keep patching that game for several months before it's release worthy and that was probably their intention to meet holiday deadlines.

Kal, I'm gonna guess you are alpha/beta testing Vesperia right? Is it the same engine Berseria was built on so you can tweak your ToB a litle and dump all sorts of goodies on us, or is it different and gonna take time?

Hey man. Do you have any idea what's going on with Just Cause 4 on PC? Haven't seen a AAA game look this bad in years. Can't tweak the .ini files, and the in-game settings seem to default to their lowest possible preset. The water in particular has to be seen to be believed. Absolutely nightmare inducing. Really curious to hear what you have to say on this. Cheers.